Lose Your Love Handles

In our first article discussing BioSignature Modulation we learned that much can be deduced about your health and overall hormonal profile by examining the localised fat deposits on your body. More accurately, the actual ratio of the differences in skin fold thickness of different areas of the body will enable a skilled practitioner to make assessments of the current state of play of your hormones, and prescribe you specific exercise and nutritional and supplementation protocols designed to optimise your hormones for your specific goals. That's whether you wish to speed up your metabolism into a fat-burning furnace, or increase your testosterone profile so as to add a bit more beef to your body.

This time we focus on how to lose your love handles, why you have fat there, and what you can do about it.

Your hormones affect where ingested calories get sent

I expect a typical client of mine to lose 50% of their starting skin fold thickness in their love handle area (the supra iliac region to give it its correct title) within six weeks. That’s a bold claim to make, but it is also a relatively straightforward one to achieve with good dietary discipline and reasonably hard work in the gym. And it all comes down to insulin management.

For some reason (the exact nature of which is still up for debate by obesity researchers), it seems that the excess carbohydrates we eat end up stored around the love handles. Excess stress (cortisol) will give you a fat belly, low testosterone will give you fat arms, and carbohydrates (due to their powerful impact upon the hormone insulin) will give you love handles.

The role of Insulin

In attempting to lose your love handles, you should consider that insulin as a storage hormone, is a more powerful than even testosterone. If you do things to your body to cause a rise in insulin levels, then the direct consequence of that is the shuttling of glucose and amino acids into the liver, muscle tissue, and adipose tissue —namely fat.

There are occasions when you may want to harness insulin’s power (post workout, once you have achieved a certain base level of conditioning), but if you wish to lose your love handles then it is an imperative that you minimise “storage opportunities”. This is done by keeping blood sugar levels low and stable. Unfortunately, modern man with his canny ways of making money and mass production has found a way to inadvertently put all the wrong things on our food shelves. For instance, in the past, all flour was coarse and unrefined and made products that digested slowly, causing a gradual release of insulin to cope with the equally gradual absorption of carbohydrates. Now we have ultra refined grains and flour so fine that it can actually float in the air!

For those of you who demand scientific verification of this information, I will say just one thing — go to PubMed and look up the symptoms of adult onset Diabetes (an inability of the human body to produce insulin). Weight loss is always present. Without the presence of insulin it would appear that it is impossible to store body fat.